English Dub Review: Hana-Kimi “Don’t Look!!”
Overview:
The photos turned out great, but Sano’s not interested in modeling. So Akiha tries to convince Mizuki.
Our Take(Spoilers):
I have to agree with Sano; I think Akiha knows Mizuki is actually a girl. He pretty much says it explicitly to Mizuki, but I feel like I must have heard him wrong. When Akiha opens up to Mizuki about feeling suicidal in the past, she headbutts the shit out of him. As someone who has been suicidal in the past, that would piss me off. Those types of thoughts aren’t exactly logical or make sense, and I think most people know that. When Mizuki gets upset that he thought about doing that, I don’t think hitting him is the best response, but that’s just another reason you can tell this show was from a different time.
The most intriguing thing was what Akiha said in response to Mizuki hitting him. He said that she was only the second girl to hit him when he confessed that. He called Mizuki a girl straight to her face, and she didn’t say anything about it. I even rewound to watch it again to see if I misheard, but that wasn’t the case. Maybe it’s something that will be addressed later, and she did, in fact, hear it.
Mizuki got a chance to spend time with Akiha’s ex-wife, Ebi. I would really like to learn more about why they got divorced. Ebi seems to still be in love with Akiha, and that leads me to believe that it was him who wanted to end things. Since she’s still in love with him, she doesn’t mind helping him out with his shoots and things. If I had to guess, I would assume that maybe Akiha started to lean more into liking guys or something, but even that doesn’t seem like the reason for their split.
I believe I’ve mentioned this before: you want side characters to be interesting, but you don’t want them to outshine the leads. The fact that I’m more interested in learning about a set of characters that were introduced one episode ago instead of Mizuki and Sano, I think, says a lot.
Speaking of Sano, wasn’t there something going on with his brother a few episodes ago? I suppose it’s not that important if we’re on this little modeling arc. This show doesn’t seem to have any direction, and I suppose that’s to be expected. When a manga author wants to keep their story serialized, they’ll add things randomly to keep up interest. It’s not working especially well in this case.
